Question

Consider this query:

SELECT table1.id, 
       table1.review, 
       table1.time, 
       table2.author, 
       table2.title 
FROM 
table1, table2 
WHERE table1.id = table2.id 
AND table1.reviewer = '{$username}'
ORDER BY table1.id

I’m using the above quite a lot around my site’s code. I find that adding the table prefixes etc. before the column names can make the query very long and take up quite a lot of lines.

Is there a way to make the above query simpler/easier?

Answer 1

First of all, you may want to give shorter aliases to your tables. In addition, you are using the implicit join syntax which complicates the WHERE clause, and is not recommended in general. You may want to use the more modern explicit syntax instead:

SELECT    t1.id, t1.review, t1.time, t2.author, t2.title 
FROM      table1 AS t1
JOIN      table2 AS t2 ON (t2.id = t1.id)
WHERE     t1.reviewer = '{$username}'
ORDER BY  t1.id

Note that JOIN is a synonym for INNER JOIN, and the AS keyword is optional when defining table aliases. You can simply use ... FROM table1 t1 ... instead of ... FROM table1 AS t1 ....